25 Little Known Facts About The Moons In Our Solar System

You already know about our moon right? It’s the big thing in the sky when you look up at night. Of course, you already knew that. Well, in this list we’re not just focusing on our moon. We’re going to be talking about all the moons in our Solar System. And there are a lot of them. Depending on how you count, you would come up to almost 200 moons. For our purposes we can say that there are 181 natural satellites in orbit around planets and dwarf planets around our sun. In fact, 19 of them are large enough to be gravitationally rounded. Basically this means that if they were directly orbiting the sun they themselves would be considered to be either planets or dwarf planets. The first moons that were discovered apart from our own moon were the Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter. They were discovered in 1610 by…big surprise…Galileo Galilei! It wasn’t until the Voyager 1 and 2 missions in the 1970s that a large number of other moons were detected. Since the year 2000, new telescope technology has also allowed for the detection of many more moons. These are 25 little known facts about the moons in our Solar System!

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Last Updated on April 21, 2016

25

Saturn's moon Enceladus has fountains that shoot large jets of water into space. According to NASA it seems like one of the most hospitable places in our Solar System outside of Earth

Source: wikipedia, Image: Kevin Gill via Flickr

24

Besides Charon, Pluto actually has 4 other moons that rotate chaotically on their axis. They were most likely formed during a collision a long time ago.

Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia

23

Saturn's moons Epimetheus and Janus are co-orbital which means they share orbits. They avoid crashing into each other, however, due to mutual acceleration and deceleration because of gravity

Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia

22

Ganymede and Titan are two of the largest moons in our Solar System. In fact, they are both bigger than Mercury

Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia

21

Neso is Neptune's most distant moon. It is so far that it takes 26 years to orbit Neptune once